Zoo Story (25 page)

Larry, so quiet before, grew positively expansive on the subject of how useful Safari Wild would be to Lowry Park, offering the zoo a safe and affordable haven for its collection. Typically, he said, zoos worried too much about overbreeding and what to do with surplus animals. Larry advocated boldness in these matters.

“We should have sustainable populations at the ready,” he said. “You manage the surplus. If you’re afraid of surplus,
then get out of the business
.”

Elena, rejuvenated by the outpouring of bravado, was smiling again. She described the game park as a place where wildlife could be wild, a place where animals would have room to move, where they could simply
be
. Clutching Pippi, she railed against humanity’s attempts to manipulate nature.

“The more we interfere, the more we muck it up,” she said. “Nature does it better than man ever could.”

Coming from the wife of a zoo director, the argument was startling Lex had devoted his career to arranging and rearranging the natural world. He was the man who made elephants fly. Safari Wild was itself a radical reconstruction of nature. The game park was spacious, yes. But it was still a glorified zoo that would ultimately be filled with animals seized from every corner of the globe, species that would never end up within ten thousand miles of one another, were it not to fulfill the whims of humans. Wasn’t the little dog nestled in Elena’s lap a classic example of manipulated nature? Hadn’t Pippi once been a wolf?

If either Lex or Larry noticed the oddity of Elena’s arguments, neither of them showed it. Maybe such contradictions were almost too much for two zoo executives to contemplate. Instead they just kept smiling as Lex drove past cypress woods where dwarf buffalo peered from the shadows, past lush green meadows where zebras kicked and snorted. It was a beautiful day, with a crystalline blue sky stretching above and a cool breeze whispering through the magnolias. A perfect day for showing off their new kingdom, teeming with new multitudes.

Others at the zoo, hearing about Safari Wild, had warned Lex that he was flying too close to the sun. Just because his other gambles had paid off did not mean he was untouchable. They warned him that there was no way to pull off the venture without tangling the interests of the zoo and the game park. This time, they said, his best intentions might not be enough to protect him. As usual, Lex had brushed away the questions. Just a couple weeks before, he had signed a memorandum of understanding with the executive committee of Lowry Park’s board, pledging that Safari Wild’s relationship with the zoo would be noncompetitive. He planned to present the memorandum to the full board at next month’s meeting. Talking it through now, he insisted that he would not profit from any relationship between the zoo and the park, that great care would be taken to guard against conflicts of interest. The arrangement would be good for both Lowry Park and Safari Wild.

“We’ve run it by the zoo’s auditors,” he said. “There has to be a very careful accounting.”

“It’s not the money that’s driving this,” said Elena.

“It’s a real benefit for everybody,” said Larry.

It was hard to tell if the three of them truly had no doubts about Lex trying to run both a nonprofit zoo and a for-profit animal attraction. Couldn’t any of them see how messy it could get with animals traveling back and forth between the two institutions? Could they not imagine how it would play in the newspapers?

Lex showed no such uncertainty. As he finished the tour of Safari Wild, he stopped the Land Rover in a meadow and called Fassil Gabremariam, the chairman of the zoo’s executive committee, and put him on speaker phone so they could talk about the arrangements. Gabremariam was a distinguished figure, a banker and businessman who had served as commissioner of the Tampa Port Authority and who was now a director of the Jacksonville branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. On the phone, he talked about Lex’s expertise and his love for animals and the excellence of his leadership. He explained that the relationship with Safari Wild would carry Lowry Park into the future.

“We need to continue to change, to grow, to maintain the quality of the product,” he said. “In order to do that, we need some extra land.”

When Lex described his plans for the zoo and the park, he sounded like an adventurer. Fassil, who had signed off on the deal, sounded more like a diplomat. Speaking quietly and with understated self-assurance, he talked about Lowry Park’s strategic design and the integrity of its assets and the delicate balance needed to perpetuate its mission.

“I want it to be the best zoo in the nation and maybe the rest of the world,” he said.

Near the end of the conversation, Fassil paused. The relationship between Lowry Park and Safari Wild was still in its early stages, he said, choosing his words carefully. Developing that relationship would be sensitive. He thought it best, he said, if this conversation—indeed, any reference to Safari Wild—stayed out of the newspaper until Lex and the executive committee had a chance to present their proposal to the zoo’s full board. Lex listened respectfully and did not overrule the request immediately, as he had with his wife. Instead, he thanked Fassil and said something noncommittal about how he would figure it out. Then, after hanging up, Lex said it was fine, he’d smooth it over with Fassil and make sure the board was up to speed before the news hit the paper.

In the space of an hour or so, Elena and Fassil—two people he trusted—had counseled a modicum of caution. But Lex was undeterred. If anything, he was exuberant. Safari Wild, he said, was just one step in his own strategic design. Within five years, he hoped that the zoo would acquire an even bigger parcel of land, possibly as much as two thousand acres, somewhere outside of Tampa. He saw this larger game park—which would serve as an extension of the existing zoo—as the next stage in the zoo’s evolution.

“We’re not done,” he said, grinning. “We’re just getting started.”

He hit the accelerator and pushed on.

The real trouble began when the monkeys decided to take a swim.

Their mass plunge, an act of defiance that would soon acquire the shimmer of legend, took place on April 19, 2008. The fifteen patas monkeys had arrived at Safari Wild and been exiled on the island only two days earlier. Up to that point, they had been kept in cages. The only reason they escaped was because Lex wanted to let them out of the cages and give them a chance to enjoy the open space of the island. A couple people had warned him the species could swim, but he believed that the sixty-foot moat would hold them, even if they could.

That Saturday morning, one of Lex’s employees freed the monkeys from their cages. Given the uncertainty of the species’ abilities, there had been some debate about whether to introduce them onto the island one at a time, or all at once. The staffer settled the debate by letting them out together. As he watched, one of the females promptly jumped into the water and began paddling, with the other fourteen quickly following.

The staffer immediately called Lex.

“The introduction,” he said, in a massive understatement, “has gone very badly.”

It’s not clear if the monkeys had a leader or a plan, or if they just spontaneously decided it was time to go. There were two babies in the group, both of whom presumably clung to their mothers’ necks to avoid drowning. Possibly the others held paws or even tails. Somehow, all fifteen made it safely across, climbed an eight-foot wall on the other side, then fled into the surrounding swampland.

“They outfoxed me,” Lex said afterward. “I think they’re more street smart than a zoo monkey.”

Patas monkeys are native to Africa, but these fifteen had come from Puerto Rico, where their species had been introduced into the wild and allowed to multiply beyond human control. They raised such havoc, raiding pineapple and plantain crops, that the government had insisted some either be killed or be sent away to new homes. Lex, already familiar with the death-or-captivity equation, had seen a good opportunity to rescue some monkeys and stock his game park with a fascinating species.

To human eyes, patas monkeys appear somewhat comical. They have a rusty-colored coat, but their cheeks sport swaths of white hair that look like Prussian sideburns, which gives them a remarkable resemblance to those grumpy, grizzled colonels who sport muttonchops in old movies. They have a habit of bouncing up and down, which is why they’re sometimes called dancing monkeys. They’re not particularly big—the males typically weigh about twenty-seven pounds and the females roughly fourteen—but they have elaborate defenses to keep them out of the jaws of predators. Able to run at thirty-five miles per hour, equipped with the thin and elongated bodies of greyhounds, they are officially the fastest monkey on Earth. Though they are a social species and tend to live in groups, they are extremely skittish and tend to bolt. When chased, they rely on evasive tactics, often splitting into two groups. Sometimes one patas will act as a decoy and lead the threat away from the others. At night, they sleep one monkey to a tree to avoid detection.

None of this deterred Lex. Flashing his famous confidence, he promised that the fifteen escapees would be captured and back in custody at Safari Wild within a week. The monkeys were easy enough to find, at least at first. But every time one of Lex’s trappers crept toward the monkeys’ hiding places, the animals fled. The trappers attempted to lure them into crates baited with apples and bananas and monkey chow. But the monkeys were too smart.

Soon reporters were calling Lex, calling the zoo, calling the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. TV news vans hurried down quiet country roads, headed for Safari Wild. One day a news helicopter appeared in the sky above the park, presumably in pursuit of an aerial sighting of one of the escapees. The noise only made the situation worse, scaring the monkeys and driving them deeper into the swamp. In early May, the trappers caught the first two of the fifteen, a female and a baby. In mid-June, they got three more. But ten monkeys remained at large. Sightings were reported as far as Dade City, twenty-five miles away. A woman who lived on the other side of the swamp called her sister one night after seeing what she believed to be three of the escapees lurking in the trees outside her house, chirping.

“I have monkeys in my yard,” she said.

On the other end of the line, her sister paused. “Really? Monkeys?”

“Yes.”

The sister searched online for information about patas monkeys and read about them stealing the crops in Puerto Rico.

“Give them some fresh pineapple,” she advised.

“I don’t have any fresh pineapple!”

The woman searched her kitchen and found a banana and placed it on a branch. A little while later, when she looked back outside, the banana was gone.

People who lived near Safari Wild scanned the woods through binoculars, hoping for a glimpse of the fugitives. Others saw them by chance in the distance and wondered if they were hallucinating. The monkeys were seen sprinting across pastures, peering out from trees, foraging for food. They snuck onto a ranch and fiddled with the switches and knobs on two tractors until the batteries went dead. The rancher figured out what had happened when he discovered tiny paw prints in the dust. His grandson offered to shoot the monkeys, but the rancher didn’t want to hurt them. Too pretty, he said. When corn began to vanish from the rancher’s deer feeders, he set up a motion-sensitive camera, just to see them up close. He’d spied the monkeys before, out on his property, but had never gotten within a hundred yards before they disappeared.

The monkeys didn’t mind the camera. Soon the rancher had dozens of photos that showed them climbing all over his corn feeders, reaching inside a cage to spin the mechanism that released the grain, staring at a raccoon that had been caught inside a trap intended for them. He was struck by how relaxed the monkeys seemed, how brazen.

“They’re smart,” he said. “Very smart.”

The newspapers and TV stations ate all of it up. The monkeys’ mass breakout was irresistible to the journalists’ sensibilities, even more so than Enshalla’s surprising death. The tiger’s escape had been big news, without question. But the whole thing was over in less than two hours, and with no further developments, the outrage had quickly faded. The monkey caper lingered on and on and got better with every new twist. In those first months, everything about the story—the Prussian sideburns, the way the monkeys evaded the trackers—was funny. Just the word “monkey” had a power all its own. It energized any headline, made any newscast more zany.

Something else was driving the coverage as well, something that had started out underneath but was now surfacing. With every new update, readers and viewers were reminded that a zoo director—the same man who had gunned down Enshalla—was now being outwitted by a gang of wayward monkeys. Tracing the narrative arc between the two events engendered a certain smugness, a satisfaction that only grew as the coverage continued. Soon the story wasn’t really about the monkeys anymore. It was about the spectacle of watching Lex finally getting his comeuppance.

The second act
of the public shaming opened that fall.

The reporters intensified the pressure. The escape of the patas monkeys had drawn their attention to Safari Wild, which had received almost no prior coverage. They started asking questions about Lex; the ties between Lowry Park and Safari Wild; and how anyone could possibly be running a nonprofit zoo and building a for-profit game park, both within fifty miles of each other. These were the questions that Lex had been warned about, and now they were being posed almost every day in the newspapers and on TV newscasts.

Revelations tumbled forth with dizzying speed, chronicling an ever-growing list of conflicts of interest. There were articles about Lex trading animals back and forth between the zoo and the game park and his ranch, about Lex selling animals to the zoo at one price and buying them from the zoo at another, and about how a giraffe and an antelope that had been transferred from the zoo to Lex’s ranch had died there. It turned out that Lowry Park employees, their salaries paid for partially by tax dollars, had built two barns at Safari Wild, and that the five bison who had been nudged out of the zoo to make room for Gator Falls were not only staying at the game park, but the zoo was paying the park six hundred dollars a month to house the animals.

On and on it went.

For a time, Lex defended himself. He insisted that he’d never profited from any of these dealings and that he had only wanted to help the zoo grow by allowing them space for their surplus animals. He said he had nothing to hide, but allowed that there had been misunderstandings and errors in judgment.

“I should have had better political instincts,” he said. “But I’m not a political person.”

The statement was curious. It felt disingenuous, because over the years Lex had proved to be a skilled politician, someone who knew the system and had the judgment to manipulate it to Lowry Park’s advantage. He could never have carried out the zoo’s transformation had it not been for his gift for wooing county commissioners and mayors and governors and legislators, not to mention corporate executives and society mavens and assorted multimillionaires. And yet the statement essentially proved that whatever political instincts he once possessed had slipped away. To suggest that his mistakes had been merely political, not substantive, was guaranteed to raise the eyebrows of even those who wanted to keep faith in his best intentions.

Early on, when he was still giving interviews, Lex pointed out that his dealings with the zoo had been vetted for any potential impropriety. After all, he had signed the memorandum of understanding with Lowry Park’s executive committee to avoid the very accusations he now faced. True enough. But then it came out that the zoo’s board had reviewed the memo over the summer and had been concerned enough to dissolve the agreement.

It did not advance Lex’s case when Fassil Gabremariam, who had approved many transactions between the zoo and the game park, turned out to be listed in Safari Wild’s incorporation papers as an officer in the game park’s conservation fund. The water grew even muddier when it was revealed that two of the white rhinos that Lowry Park had loaned Safari Wild were pregnant, and that the original agreement had called for the first rhino calf to be given to the zoo and the second to the game park. It was roughly at this point that Pam Iorio, Tampa’s mayor, got mad enough to jump in. Iorio publicly reminded Lex that the zoo operated under the oversight of the city of Tampa; according to a lease, both the land under the zoo and the animals were owned by the city. She ordered an audit of Lowry Park’s dealings with Safari Wild, insisting that the zoo and the game park sever all ties and that the park return any of the zoo’s animals it was still holding.

At first Lex tried to argue with the mayor—more proof that his instincts were failing him. But then he learned to be quiet and agreed to most of the mayor’s demands. He announced that he would take a leave of absence from the zoo while the city conducted its audit.

A couple of months later, the audit came back loaded with bomb-shells. The report said that Lex had charged the zoo almost four thousand dollars in reimbursements for a three-day trip to Paris that he and Elena had enjoyed on their way back from an international conference in South Africa. It also cited Lex’s divisive management style and confirmed, after interviews with the staff, that he had created a climate of fear where employees hesitated to speak out. But the most damning findings detailed the rampant conflicts of interest. The bottom line, the report said, was that Lex’s pattern of improper dealings had cost the zoo more than $200,000.

Fundamentally, Mr. Salisbury appeared to treat the operation at Lowry Park Zoo, his for-profit venture Safari Wild, and his residence ranch as one. . . . He seems unable to differentiate between his role as CEO of the Zoo and the role he plays with his business and his ranch . . .

The audit was sixty pages long. Once Mayor Iorio heard what it contained, all restraint fell away. She demanded that Lex be fired and that he repay the $200,000. She also seconded the audit’s recommendation that the case be turned over to law authorities to decide if criminal prosecution was warranted.

Lex, no longer willing to be silent, returned fire with a statement released through his attorney. He blasted the city auditors for ignoring his side of the story and called them “minions” of the mayor. He said that in reality, the zoo owed
him
$403,117 for housing their animals for free or at discount and for loaning his own animals to the zoo. And he vowed to fight for his job at an upcoming meeting of the zoo’s board.

Ultimately, it was up to the board and not the mayor whether Lex stayed on. Judging from the reactions of board members to the audit, his chances did not look good. One member offered him a piece of advice: “Plead for mercy.”

The debacle was already tarnishing both Lex and the zoo itself. As the revelations mounted, the AZA temporarily suspended Lowry Park’s accreditation, which it had held for twenty years. Without the AZA’s seal of approval, the number one family zoo in America tumbled toward disgrace. It stood to lose its lease with the city, which required that it maintain the accreditation, and as long as the suspension held, it could not trade animals with other accredited institutions. The AZA had also suspended Lex’s individual membership. He was officially persona non grata.

Lex made an easy target. For years he had reveled in the scorn of others and nurtured a cult of his own oversized personality. It was obvious that he loved the zoo, but his love had brought not just increased revenues but devastation. He was both creator and destroyer. Even so, whatever had gone wrong at Lowry Park was not his fault alone. Though he had perpetuated an illusion of limitless authority, in reality he served at the discretion of Lowry Park’s board. The thirty-some directors on that board were hardly powerless. Among them were a former governor of Florida and a former mayor of Tampa, plus an assortment of other public officials, corporate execs, and high-powered lawyers. Not exactly a timid bunch. Surely a few of them had heard some of the alarming reports on staff morale. It must have penetrated their consciousness that two of the zoo’s most famous animals had died bloody and unnecessary deaths. Any of these directors could have stepped outside their comfort zones and wandered the zoo on their own and talked quietly to the staff. And if they didn’t like what they learned, the board members had the authority to fire the CEO whenever they pleased.